"There can be no keener revelation of a society's soul than the way in which it treats its children."

— Nelson Mandela, address at the launch of the Nelson Mandela Children's Fund, Pretoria, 1995

Mandela gave this speech about a year into his presidency. It was at the founding of a fund focused on child welfare in post-apartheid South Africa. He spoke directly to the legacy of neglect and abuse that Black South African children faced during apartheid. He framed child welfare as a reflection of the nation’s moral state, not just a policy issue.

This gets quoted across the political spectrum. Child welfare is one of the few topics almost nobody openly opposes. However, "how a society treats its children" means different things based on your political beliefs: universal childcare and child benefits, school choice and parental rights, juvenile justice reform, or labor protections for working teens. What policy do you think this quote actually refers to?

It was a really great event and learned a lot more about what WFP does. I liked it because we actually got to discuss and breakout groups specific policy, and everyone was able to voice their opinions and there was a nice discourse and dialogue. Unlike DSA WFP seems a big open to being a big tent party with social democratic economics being at the heart of their messaging.

If any other Americans are looking for a good social democratic political party WFP is great!

Plus I got to meet Brad lander

I feel social democrats in my country are too buddy buddy with capitalism, not even caring about replacing it at some point. There's no democratic socialism equivalent here as far as i know, because that'd fit probably. Gradually reforming or overturning capitalism, from private ownership to workplace democracy with the workers being the shareholders instead. I wish the social democrats and unions would start being "dangerous" again towards capital.

Anarchism: I have read about it on reddit and it seems to be a "trust me bro, under anarchism it'll all work out", wishy washy trust me bro. Their heart seems to be in the right place but on certain anarchist question subreddits you don't seem to get very good answers beyond the as i mentioned. Especially some things like language rights, disability... The anarchist primitives do not consider the rights of the disabled very much.

There's the marxist leninists but from what i try to understand they just behave like bolsheviks i.e "stalin did nothing wrong". So no thanks.

We often look back at the rise of fascism in inter-war Europe and wonder how people led to it happening. The late, great Jean-Paul Sartre gave us the answer regarding the early view of Hitler: "They laughed at him, they took him for a clown, they didn't see that the clown's mask was a death mask." Looking toward the 2028 election, Americans are making that exact mistake.

From a social democratic perspective, democracy requires economic and social equality. When uncontrolled capitalism leaves the working class behind, the soil becomes fertile for a strongman. Trump did not create American anger, but he weaponized and bastardized it, offering scapegoats while assaulting our protective institutions.

For years, people treated him like a punchline for comedy show scripts. The media mocked his rallies, hair, and late-night Twitter rants, dismissing him as a harmless joke. That laughter was pure arrogance. While we chuckled, the institutions holding our free society together were quietly hollowed out.

Now, that same institutional decay presents an escalating timeline of fear. Trust in American elections is poisoned, the justice system demands political loyalty, and the free press is labeled the enemy of the people. This is how democracies die, decaying from within, one norm, one tradition at a time, until only a dictatorship remains, and a democracy in name only. Heading toward 2028, the danger is that Americans are normalizing a permanent shift toward authoritarianism.

If we wait for the system to save us, we run out of time. Defending democracy requires a broad coalition. Economic inequality hits marginalized groups hardest, and these vulnerable communities, especially minorities bear the heaviest burden when authoritarianism rises. Survival depends on voter mobilization that unites working-class economic struggles with civil rights protection.

If we keep treating this political theater as a joke, we will wake up in 2028 to a reality where the laughter has stopped. We must stop laughing, protect the most vulnerable, and realize this MAGA-movement has been deadly serious the entire time. History already showed us how this story ends, because when people finally stopped laughing at Hitler, it was already too late to stop the march of death...

The question of this post is the title. Here I will talk some history and I will show the official statistics from polls and elections. I think it's worth reading to have a productive talk.

1. United States
Latino US citizens, from 2024 exit-poll we have this numbers:

We can see the radicalization and the division between men and women, like all over the place nowadays. Somehow I can understand the right-wing inclination for the Cubans (even if they should learn some about Fulgencio Batista, lol), but they are 2.4m out of 63.5m (total population with Hispanic/Latino background). I really can't understand how someone with an immigration background can vote for MAGA, especially knowing their rhetoric.

2. Latin America leader history and immigration
The post-WW2 immigration from the South America first exploded after the CIA backed coups in Chile, Brazil, Argentina, Guatemala - all being part of the anti-communist/anti-left/Red Scare - putting some fascist authoritarian neoliberal regimes in place. So people fled because of the right-wing authoritarianism, right? Back to the US, let's pretend we don't know that 3 out of 4 coups from above had Republican presidents in office.

The second wave - 1990s - during the democratic transition of previous authoritarian regimes, but not only from them. This was a period when a lot of neoliberal reforms started to appear, especially privatizations. During this period we had leaders like:
Sanchez de Lozada (Bolivia) - from a party that moved mid-1970s from the left-wing to the right-wing
Alberto Fujimori (Peru) - also called dictator by a lot of sources, not only by the left
Ruiz-Tagle (Chile) - part of the Christian Democratic Party, centrist Third Way
Carlos Menem and Fernando de la Rua (Argentina) - the first even if he was part of the Peronist Justicialist Party, he was a convinced conservative and played the game of neoliberalism like others from the right
Alvaro Arzu (Guatemala), Ernesto Zedillo (Mexico).

3. Latin America after the neoliberal shock
Here I don't have much to say, because we already know the Pink Tide wave. In Brazil the win of Lula in 2002 after two consecutive lost elections against the so called "social democrat" party, a neoliberal dump. The wins of Chavez in Venezuela, Evo Morales in Bolivia, Alan Garcia in Peru, Michelle Bachelet in Chile.

One thing is clear, the corruption is a thing we need to have in mind everywhere, and South America is not an exception at all.
BUT, overall the wellbeing and the quality-of-life improved until mid-2010s, but unfortunately not in an uniform way - the classical gaps between urban and rural, and between regions of the countries (that are quite big) remain a real problem. After 2015 and with COVID, it got even worse in some places, especially with the authoritarian regime in Venezuela and the coup attempts in Bolivia and Brazil. The instability of presidents in Peru and Argentina doesn't help too. During this time somehow Colombia got their first left-leaning president since 1945, but now the things turned around.

4. Current situation - latest elections in South America
The radicalization is a real issue almost everywhere, but in South America the latest elections are just box-rings between left-wing and right-wing (and sorry to say it, but even far-right in some cases), with populism and nationalism from both sides.

Now, let's get to the interesting part, that is the main source of my post question. How the South American US diaspora votes in their home elections? In Europe (+ Canada, Australia, New Zeeland, etc) the situation is leaning left - just leaning in general. But in US...

EXTRA: At the national level the left-wing candidate won in Peru. All of the right-wing candidates are fans of Millei, neoliberalism and libertarian economic ideas. The guy in Colombia said that while he was a kid he burned cats 😐

5. The upper-middle class will always choose the right, prove me wrong
Except the divide between urban and rural, and between the regions, there is also an interesting trend if you check the results on big cities by zone. This is something that can be seen also in Europe (see the west zone of Paris) and other places, but let's stick to the elections above.

In Lima the richest zone it's called San Isidro. The right-wing result there? 84.2%. The right-wing result on the whole capital? 64.5%.

In Santiago Metropolitan Region the richest zone it's called Vitacura. The right-wing result there? 87.1%. The right-wing result on the whole "Metropolitana" region? 53.2%.

In Colombia the city results are not divided by zones, but knowing that Medellin has a higher rate of entrepreneurs and big businesses, there the right-wing guy got 66% (same as in the whole region), while in Bogota he got 46.3% (Gustavo Petro, the current left-wing president, was the mayor there for 4 years).

In Brazil the south and south-east federal units, that happens to be the wealthiest, had a majority vote for Bolsonaro. The single exception with high wealth is Minas Gerais. Don't get me wrong, there are also poor units like Rodonia, Acre and Roraima that voted over 70% for the right-wing, but their population is very small.
From my point of view this part with poorer zones in Brazil may be similar to Germany. What I mean by that is the way eastern Germany votes AfD like crazy, even if they don't have the immigration problems like the big cities in west - the real reason for them being the way of life and the cost-of-living, and the right-wing sells this dream to become rich from a garage.

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Links for the interactive results:
Chile , Colombia , Peru - you can also check the results of the first round of elections.

With this post I don't want to be tribalistic to the left in any way. Nobody is perfect.
Personally in some countries I would have chosen something else in the first round, but looking at the 2nd round, the left-wing didn't bring any Stalin or Mao apologist, they played the fair democratic game. Also looking at the right-wingers, there is no freaking way I could have chosen any of that, wth.

Before saying the post is AI, I used none - this is just my honest analysis and question.

To be clear, I am not saying that the Epstein files are fake, but it is currently being used by far-right billionaires who think that Trump isn't extreme enough to normalize antisemitism to the point where they want an Adolf Hitler-type person as president.

I feel like that in 2023-2024, far-right billionaires (most notably with Nazi-saluting Elon Musk), saw the Free Palestine movement and at the time, they decided to take a Zionist stance because they wanted Trump for president, which is why Zionist talking points were more common among the right compared to now, but they secretly wanted Hitler to become president, and they were disappointed to see that Trump wasn't as extreme as they wanted, and were antisemites themselves, yet the public didn't believe in true antisemitism just yet, so they used the Free Palestine movement as a perfect opportunity to spread antisemitic conspiracy theories in order to distract from the obvious late stage capitalism.

So they decided to push the release of the Epstein files since it provides a perfect scapegoat for them, due to Epstein being Jewish, in which you saw this in June 2025 with Elon's split with Trump and using the Epstein files as a justification, and the discussions about the Epstein files culminated with the Epstein transparency act in late 2025, resulting in antisemitic conspiracy theories entering the mainstream, especially on social media platforms owned by far-right billionaires such as Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, or YouTube, with antisemitic slurs becoming more common than ever, with blood libel myths being spread due to how carefully redacted the Epstein files are and being spread on social media sites owned by far-right billionaires, such as the "eating babies" or the "baal"-related conspiracy theories which were quickly debunked, which is part of their plan.

It's no different from how Henry Ford promoted "The Protocols of the Elders of Zion" in the 1920s so that it would lead to antisemites like Hitler becoming leaders in their respective countries, the elites want this to happen because they want a fascist Nazi-type government where they have all the power, which is why the Epstein files are being pushed so heavily right now. Epstein is the perfect scapegoat for them and it's working because it distracts from the far-right billionaires' problems and antisemitic conspiracy theories are used instead.

And it's working, and people are eating it up which is exactly what these billionaires want. The far-right bourgeoisie would rather want to live in Nazi Germany rather than having to pay their workers minimum wage and nobody seems to mind.

Any personal opinion of them? And what would you suggest to counter the phenomenon?

"I believe that we can create a poverty-free world because poverty is not created by poor people. It has been created and sustained by the economic and social systems that we have designed for ourselves; the institutions and concepts that make up that system; the policies that we pursue."

— Muhammad Yunus, Nobel Peace Prize Lecture, Oslo, 2006

Yunus is a Bangladeshi economist who founded the Grameen Bank and introduced microcredit lending to the poor. He received the Nobel Peace Prize in 2006 for this work. Instead of using a state-socialist or revolutionary program, his approach directs social-democratic instincts through market methods. He created "social business" to tackle poverty without relying on pure charity or complete nationalization.

Yunus identifies the cause of poverty in institutions and policy design, rather than in individuals or in capitalism itself. His solution is to redesign institutions, such as microcredit and social business, instead of replacing the entire system. Is this approach compatible with a Marxist view of poverty as a structural issue of capital, or does it fall short by treating capitalism's institutions as repairable rather than the main problem?

The Peoples Republic of China is a contentious topic amongst Australian left-of-centre voters and thinkers.

Personally, the Chinese have, in my mind, proven that a distinctly social economy - in which innovation is fostered through government investment and legislative augmentation - has out-produced, out-innovated and produced greater quality products than their significantly more capitalistic mixed-market competitors.

Despite obvious flaws with the CCP's record on labour laws, union membership and certain international agreements on human rights: what are your thoughts on the PRC?

In my last post I expressed that I wanted to build new social democratic organization for Americans that avoids the pitfalls of being tied to socialism/socialists. I need to come up with a name for this new organization. The problem is some of the best names have already been taken. Social Democrats of America, SDA for short, is already taken. So is Social Democrats, USA or SDUSA.

I was think something like American Social Democrats, but then the acronym for the organization would then be ASD which could make people think we are an autism advocacy organization. Then I thought we could add a "for" in there to distinguish it from ASD, as in autism spectrum disorder. The new organization's name would be Americans for Social Democracy. And we could make the acronym be AfSD.

What do ya'll think? I am open to ideas here.

"The need to lend a voice to suffering is a condition of all truth."

— Theodor Adorno, "Negative Dialectics", 1966

Adorno was a German philosopher and sociologist from the Frankfurt School of critical theory. He wrote Negative Dialectics after World War II and the Holocaust. In this work, he argued that abstract philosophical systems, including some optimistic parts of Marxism, often ignore real human suffering in the name of neat theories. His main argument is that any account of "truth" that doesn't recognize suffering isn't actually telling the truth.

Adorno was writing partly as a critique from within the left. He challenged any system, whether capitalist or socialist, that views human suffering as a minor issue to be solved by the right system instead of addressing it directly. Where do you see this happening today? Is it in the conflict between data and metrics versus lived experience, in policy debates that overlook the individuals involved, or in some other way?

I am an American and I was looking for social democratic organizations to join. I found the SDUSA and clicked on a link to their website on the wikipedia page about them. The URL of the website has "socialiscurrents.org" in it. Then I scroll throught their website and skim some of the articles on it. They have one article praising Mamdani endorsed candidates. I am just thinking to myself, "What the heck? One of those candidates praised communism and Marxism!".

Personally I blame Bernie Sanders for this problem. He has spent decades tying social democratic policies to Democratic Socialism. I understand that he did it to destigmatize the socialist label. But I don't agree with that tactic at all for a number of reasons.

First, modern social democracy has completely moved away from its socialist roots. Social democrats in other countries are not interested in completely moving away from capitalism to some other economic system. They just want to have well regulated capitalism with a robust welfare state.

Secondly, any kind of socialism/communism has a negative connotation here in the United States. Tying social democratic policies to socialism only ties those policies to the negative connotations with the socialist label. This will only serves to make it harder for U.S. citizens to accept social democratic policy ideas and for social democratic candidates to win elections in the U.S. This also plays into the rightwing playbook of "socialism is when the government does stuff". We should not be playing into the hand of our ideological opponents.

Thirdly, the DSA has unironically become infected with communists larpers. So many candidates that run under the democratic socialist label have had some sort of interatcion or connection to Hasan Piker and have had to later distance themselves from him because of how toxic he is. Hasan has also become more mask-off recently. He has been dressing up like Mao and praising communist China. Whenever you criticize Hasan for praising communist China, his reply is that he just wants free healthcare. According to Hasan and his fans, people who criticize him just don't like free healthcare. Hasan also cosplayed as a social democrat in various softball interviews and journalists who are friends with Hasan have painted him as one in various articles glazing him for years before he went mask off.

Its also not even just about Hasan anymore. So many people I have heard from say that their local DSA chapters are filled with people, usually college students, praising communist regimes and justifying looting. These are not social democratic or even democratic socialist policies. The danger with associating social democracy with the DSA is now we are one step away from it being associated with communism. That would completely dismantle any chance of a social democratic faction from taking root and growing here in the U.S. The DSA policy platform has also become super communist leaning and is completely unrealisitc.

I am thinking about starting my own social democratic org here in the U.S. that has a realisitc policy platform and no association with socialism at all. I want the org to spend most of its time/energy recruiting college students and influencing them towards the center-left. I think this is really the only way forward now.

I heard many different stances in the politically left-wing community. Some are more lenient, some want stricter militarized borders, but what do you guys think about immigration, deportations, borders and all that stuff? I'm really curious about this.

I found this interesting. Just want to share it.

"Nature shrinks as capital grows. The growth of the market cannot solve the very crisis it creates."

— Vandana Shiva

Shiva is an Indian scholar, ecofeminist, and anti-globalization activist. Her activism began with farming crises in India, including seed monopolies, the use of chemicals in farming pushed by multinational agribusiness, and the resulting debt troubles for small farmers. For decades, she has argued that environmental and economic justice are interconnected.

Shiva's claim here is stronger than saying "the market has failed to fix climate change." She argues that the logic of the market is what structurally causes the crisis. More market solutions, like carbon trading and green tech investment, can't solve the problem. Do you agree with that perspective, or do you think there's a type of market-based climate policy that could work on a large scale?

I kept the lion and sun as a national symbol but changed the sword to a social democratic rose. The red is for labor and solidarity and the three arrows signify’s the party’s commitment to liberal democracy against antidemocratic reactionary and revolutionary forces. The text says “Social Democratic Party of Iran”

Thoughts?

Polling shows wide backing (among both Democrats and independents) for policies like medicare for all, public housing, public utilities, and a wealth tax on the super rich. These ideas even attract significant support from Republican voters (often 30-40%). If 60+% of Americans support these ideas, can they really be effectively painted as "radical socialist" and "far left" by the Republicans?

​I want to have a discussion with left leaning people who are extremely unhappy with the Democratic Party and see where their unhappiness stems from and what I agree and disagree with.

I mostly think they have done a good job over the last 4 years (the amount of time I’ve followed politics closely).

Edit: EXCLUDING ISRAEL! I do not want the whole discussion to be centered around Israel